That’s Overwatch, the upcoming free-to-play game from… Nope. Let’s try again. That’s LawBreakers, the upcoming free-to-play game from Boss Key Productions, Cliff Bleszinski’s venture after leaving Epic Games. It’s a class-based arena shooter with which the veteran game designer promises to bring “skill, not streaks” back to the genre. It’s coming in 2016 to the PC, and although pricing and specifics haven’t been revealed yet, it’s being published by Nexon, which also published Dirty Bomb – another class-based free-to-play shooter.
The anus doors in Prey. The beheading in God of War 3. The many grim deaths of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. Every time you experience something gross in a videogame, people toiled hard to make that happen. An animator had to figure out how a person’s head would tear off. An artist had to research the textures for diseased skin. A sound designer had to mix the screams. Gamasutra has a piece about how these folks go about grossing gamers out and what kind of toll it takes on the people doing the work. It turns out that you can hate Halo 3’s Cortana levels for more than just throwing you into an impossible fight against the Flood.
“We wanted a lot of long stringy tunnels, and I’d gotten the idea of looking at colonoscopy videos for reference. So I was watching all these colonoscopy videos to get ideas on what I could do to mimic their style, that feeling of being inside something.”
As much as you detested running through those tunnels, you have nothing on Halo artist Vic DeLeon. He had to watch footage that came from inside someone’s butt to make those areas. A true gaming hero.
YouTube Gaming has launched. Google’s streaming video service competes directly with established services like Twitch by concentrating on gaming. It offers most of the features that Twitch does, but adds the financial clout and technical knowhow of Google. YouTube Gaming does some things Twitch doesn’t, like automatically archiving videos and a DVR mode that allows viewers to rewind a current stream. Tech-heads applaud the service’s use of HTML5 instead of Flash, which Twitch currently still uses to power their videos.
Some of the biggest YouTube gaming channels like jackfrags and Machinima have seamlessly become YouTube Gaming channels, which means Google’s infant service already has a sizeable audience. Google has also smartly bundled up existing YouTube videos on games and placed them into the channels for whatever game the video covers into the new service.
Will Google’s foray into gaming dethrone the current king? YouTube Gaming is off to a good start, but the key will be swiping the big official tournaments from Twitch. If Google can woo the heavy-hitters like Valve, Blizzard, Riot, and others away from Twitch, and if they can overcome the reservations some established star streamers have, YouTube Gaming may become as ubiquitous as VEVO is for music videos.
If you’re interested in becoming a YouTube streamer you can start the process here.
Canadian developer Longbow Games made quite a splash with Hegemony I, set in ancient Greece, and Hegemony II, set in ancient Rome. The schtick in their strategy games was a unified real-time world where you didn’t have to sit through a long loading screen every time you fought a battle. The battle just happened, right there on the strategic map, the same way actual battles happened in history. That’s realism.
Unfortunately, Longbow’s attempt to Kickstarter Hegemony III didn’t take. Was it because it was set in pre-ancient Greek times, before Alexander came along and made everything cool? Was it because Hegemony II was already plenty good and full of open-ended content? Was it because strategy game fans are too stingy to pony up a mere $30,000? Canadian dollars, sure. But, still, only thirty thousand of them. Whatever the case, Longbow was all, like, screw Kickstarter, we’re going to do it anyway and hope people just buy it when it comes out. That time is now. Hegemony III is out today on Steam for less than thirty bucks.
The thing about a Hegemony game is that the gameplay trumps the setting. I have no idea who these people are when I select one of the four factions in the basic campaign. The Veii, the Valathri, the Velch, and the Clevsin? I think I’ve fought all those guys in Star Control, but I couldn’t tell you anything about them. Hegemony III’s objective-based campaign will walk you through the ins-and-outs of being, say, a Veii in the olden days. But for everyone else, there’s the grand campaign, where you aren’t limited to just four factions. Let’s take a look.
After the jump, I came, I saw, I froze up because I didn’t know which one to take.Continue reading →
Just in case you were planning on playing any new games, Blizzard has released the 2.3.0 patch for Diablo III on the PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. It adds a new snow biome called the ruins of Sescheron. It is physically impossible to say the name of this new place without sounding like you’re drunk. The ruins of Sescheron (hic!) is where you’ll find the Horadric Cube, except now it’s called Kanai’s Cube because the name Horadric Cube was taken. Throw legendary items into this doo-dad to collect and catalog their powers for use in crafting recipes. Gotta catch ’em all! You can also more easily assemble sets of gear that were previously the domain of the random numbers generator’s cruel tyranny. Basically, your newfound Cube leads you down a whole new rabbit hole of crafting, guaranteed to keep you from playing other games for weeks to come.
Among the other changes, the Torment level now goes up to X. Adventure Mode, a.k.a. the Only Way To Play, has been adjusted to feed into the new crafting sink. Among the usual adjustments to the different classes, the largest chunk of text is devoted to Witch Doctor changes. Remember, kids, time spent in Diablo III not playing a Witch Doctor is time wasted!
Someone at Square Enix is going to need to brush up on ultra-exclusive real estate. They’re offering an island as part of the Just Cause 3 Win an Island contest. Just pre-order the Just Cause Day 1 Edition, then rack up chaos points by blowing things up for 90 days while playing the game. The person with the highest score at the end of the contest period gets the island. According to the rules, the publisher doesn’t have an island picked out yet, they won’t guarantee that it will habitable or that you’ll be able to reach it by anything other than a private boat, and it’s only going to be worth $50,000. Checking some island real estate sites, that will get you a tiny slip of offshore rock covered in garbage, or a sandy low-tide atoll in the middle of shark-infested waters. Obviously, Square Enix is banking on the winner opting for the cash equivalent prize. Hold out for the island, lucky winner! You’ll be king of your very own paradise nation! King!
Just Cause 3 is launching on December 1st for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC.
One of the big features of the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V is the built-in movie maker. The Rockstar Editor allows players to record and fiddle with gameplay clips. You just snapped off the perfect kill shot on a police helicopter while flipping through the air on a fiery motorcycle. Thank goodness you have the ability to record that footage with a couple of button presses, then edit it into a masterpiece worthy of YouTube or Reddit! Soon, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will have this feature as well. The two console versions are getting the editor next month.
When the update to Grand Theft Auto V hits in September, all three platforms will also get enhancements to the Rockstar Editor like ambient audio and sound effects tracks, improved Director Mode, and better camera controls. You’ll surely get the angle you need for that Trevor pooping clip now.
Last year’s Madden commercial was a wee bit abnormal. This year’s commercial for Madden is just plain nuts. The stuff happening in the short? That’s the Madden game I wish I could play.
Madden NFL 16 releases on August 25th for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.
Zombie Army Trilogy, the re-mastered and bundled package of Rebellion’s Sniper Elite zombie games, is getting an update today that adds the protagonists from Valve’s Left 4 Dead series. The free update puts Francis, Bill, Zoey, Louis, Coach, Nick, Rochelle and Ellis into 1945 zombie Germany. How did they get there? There’s a comic that explains it all, but who really cares? It’s zombie shooting!
Remember that promotional interactive teaser for Super 8 that came bundled with Portal 2? It was supposed to be part of an ongoing business and creative collaboration between Valve and J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot. At the time, Abrams said he wanted to make movies or shows set in the Half-Life or Portal universes. Since that time, nothing’s really come of it and all that excitement went the same way Guillermo del Toro’s involvement in gaming went.
It looks like something’s come of it at last. It’s not a Portal movie though, so anyone wanting to see a found-footage film of Chell will have to be content with amateur YouTube productions. It’s a new Team Fortress 2 mode. PASS Time is the result of Bad Robot, Escalation Studios, and Valve working together. It’s like Halo’s Grifball or Rocket League, but with more killing. And hats. PASS Time is available now as an open beta in Team Fortress 2.
Let’s say you successfully create a game through crowd-funding, but the launch is marred by bugs, a dearth of features, and a lack of excitement. Basically, you flubbed the release. They say you only get one chance to make a first impression, but they apparently didn’t try adding humongous mechs to their second attempt at whatever. Uber Entertainment is re-launching their planet-smashing real-time strategy game as Planetary Annihilation: Titans. It’s a standalone follow-up to Planetary Annihilation that incorporates the improvements the game received since its mediocre launch. The big new feature is the eponymous titans. They’re really big units that can crush whole armies. Beyond that, the game comes with an actual tutorial, Bounty Hunter game mode, new regular units, a revamped single player Galactic War, and maps with more terrain variety and elevations.
It’s also out right now and free to original backers of the Planetary Annihilation crowd-funding campaign. It’s on discount for people that purchased Planetary Annihilation after it launched.
Bethesda is advertising Fallout Shelter on Tinder. While joke profiles on the popular dating app are as old as a bottle of Nuka Cola, the profiles of “Vault Boy” and “Vault Girl” on Tinder is Bethesda’s creation. In fact, Bethesda is promoting the profiles on Twitter with #DateADweller. Hey, if you didn’t know it, Vault Boy is 25, into putting out fires, taking coffee breaks, collecting bottlecaps, and exploring.
Sometimes a screenshot catches your eye and makes you to want to know more about a game. That’s not the case with Fran Bow, a point-and-click adventure game out next week. I knew all I needed to know just from that image on the Steam store page. I don’t know what’s going on in that image, and frankly, I don’t care. I just want to play a game made by the folks who came up with that screenshot.
Actually, I lied. I kind of did want to know more. Just a little more. So I looked up the developer. They’re a pair of Swedes frustrated by the limitations of short film, video, and animation to tell the kinds of stories they want to tell. So they made a company, called it Killmonday Games, and took a photograph of themselves with one of them wearing a pig mask. All the words in those last two sentences make me want to play Fran Bow even more.
Now that Windows 10 is here (you did get your free upgrade to Microsoft’s latest operating system, right?) it’s time to put DirectX 12 to the test. All that fancy-schmancytalk about how the new software would get graphics cards screaming has been at the high-level because no one really had any real-world stuff to use it on. Thanks to Stardock and Oxide Games, we have that in the form of early code for Ashes of the Singularity that puts DirectX12 through its paces. The real-time strategy game is a good benchmark for performance, because like Supreme Commander, it throws hundreds of units on the screen at once. If you don’t have access to the demo, Digital Foundry posted a workup of their results. Although the testers at DF had some issues with consistent performance, Oxide pointed out that the fault was likely with the graphics card manufacturers’ code.
While there are still optimizations to be had, Ashes of the Singularity in its pre-beta stage is as or more optimized as most released games. What’s the point of optimizing code 6 months after a title is released, after all? Certainly, things will change a bit until release. But PC games with digital updates are always changing, we certainly won’t hold back from making big changes post launch if we feel it makes the game better!
Ashes of the Singularity is available in early access from the official site.
If you’re waiting for Battlefront: Star Wars to get your Playstation 4, you’re in luck! Sony just announced a Star Wars bundle, which consists of Star Wars: Battlefront, four crappy Star Wars games* no one would ever actually buy, and the PS4 in that picture up there. While I get the theming on the console — that’s a Darth Vader portrait worthy of the side of a 1978 Dodge van — I’m not sure what’s up with the controller. Is that the official Star Wars color scheme? Did they have to write Star Wars over and over on the touchpad? Why is only the circle button red? It’s upstaging the X, as if it now has special importance. If I had that controller, I’d be tempted to press circle to fire.
The Star Wars PS4 bundle comes out on November 7th. Your move, Microsoft.
* Super Star Wars, Bounty Hunter, Racer Revenge, and Jedi Starfighter. If I’ve played any of these, I blocked it out of my memory.
